Rootin’ tootin’ biopic may struggle to win over the Brits
The tacit assumption that lies behind any biography is that the person’s life is interesting. In many cases the assumption behind the assumption is that their life is interesting because their work is interesting. In the case of George Jones and Tammy Wynette, the “king and queen of country” in the 1970s, that presents a problem, at least to British viewers, because here country music is generally treated with the same level of reverence as WWE wrestling. I am not proud of my ignorance, but it remains the case that I had never heard of George Jones, and I last heard Tammy Wynette singing on the (admittedly excellent) KLF song Justified & Ancient.
With that accepted, George & Tammy (Paramount+), an awards-bait chunk of premium streaming starring A-listers Jessica Chastain and Michael Shannon, was about as good as it could have been to these philistinish eyes. It was a detailed, beautifully-made trip back to the late 1960s chronicling the booze-sodden decline of Jones’s career, the hairspray-laden birth of Wynette’s and the ructions caused by their love affair. Whatever it took to get actors of the calibre of Shannon and Chastain on screen together was worth every cent – they’re both the sort of performers you would pay to watch assembling a flat pack.
Which was lucky, as this first episode (of eight) was not exactly looking to grab you by the lapels. In music biopics like this, or Ray or 2005’s Walk the Line, one of the central directorial decisions is how much actual music-making to show, given that it will never stand comparison with the real performer on stage. In the case of George & Tammy, the decision has been made to show really quite a lot of G&T delighting the Grand Old Opry or the Knoxville Theatre. Initially it was impressive that Chastain and Shannon were singing for real, at least for the first few minutes. But after that it felt slightly like repeated reminders that look, the superstar actors can sing mighty fine!
Much better was when the camera lingered on the two leads simply evincing a fierce chemistry. Shannon we know is the absolute master of the thinly disguised, brutally discharged mental meltdown; but Chastain as Wynette was also entirely convincing in a difficult role – an essentially good woman doing something that she knows is probably wrong. It’s obvious, even to Jones and Wynette, that their relationship is going to be a rootin’ tootin’ rollercoaster ride into pedalsteel guitar sadness and regret, but they’re both so good that even the inevitable is going to be worth watching. I’ll just be fast forwarding the songs.
Sky Documentaries’ new series about Richard Branson runs to four hours, but it’s quite possible its best moment will turn out to be the first minute. We open 16 days before Branson, a man in his seventies, is going to blast off in to space. Just in case – because rocketeering is risky – Branson sits down in a breezy room on his private island to record a video to be played back to his family should he die. He talks about his life in the past tense, stutters and then has to stop. He’s crying. “Sorry,” he says to the cameraman, “this is bizarre.”
Bizarre it is, particularly because it comes from a man who, the rest of the documentary makes plain, is a master of self-fashioning. Chris Smith’s film jumps back and forth through Branson’s life and career, finding parallels between, for example, the hurricane that hit his Necker Island Shangri-la in 2017 and the financial hurricane that hit his record company back in the 1970s. But only once, at least in the opening episode, do we see Branson drop the mask on camera. The paths of glory lead but to the grave and all that, and it’s remarkable to see Branson floored by the thought of a world without him in it.
That moment aside, the first part of Branson is very much the story of his life told on his terms. That’s not to say it’s a puff piece – I’ve watched further episodes and this is merely setting the groundwork for a grittier crossexamination to come. Nonetheless, it’s made abundantly clear that Branson’s genius, if it is that, has been to surround himself with brilliant people. And every one of them says that underneath the goatee beard and the woolly jumpers Branson is absolutely focused on the bottom line.
That, of course, runs contrary to the man that Branson would prefer us to think of – the adventurer, the iconoclast, the eccentric; the instinctive risk-taker who called one of his books Screw It, Let’s Do It. That’s all in here too but part of what makes this series so compelling is the subtle, unspoken tug of war over who’s controlling the narrative. Watch carefully and you’ll see that director Smith never quite lets Virgin’s marketing operation have the reins.
George & Tammy ★★★ Branson ★★★★